德勤：Slow growth in wages：Is the reason occupational shifts
时间 : 2021-07-19 15:53:36
THE labor market in the United States continued to show strength up until the apparent end of the expansion in March due to efforts to contain the spread of COVID-19. Yet for all the job gains and low unemployment—it was a mere 3.5 percent in February 2020—wages haven’t risen by much.1 While employment has gone up by 15 percent since the trough in December 2009, wage gains have been much lower. Real average hourly earnings—nominal values adjusted for inflation—have gone up by only 6.8 percent in this period.2 And even the current tightness in the labor market was not able to push wages up toward a higher growth trajectory.
What explains this slow pace of real wage growth amid such a tight labor market during the current economic expansion? Our analysis of occupations data (see sidebar, “Data brief and methodology”) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reveals that part of the explanation lies in the shifting occupational mix of employment. During 2007-2010, a period that covers the Great Recession, relatively more job losses among lower-paid occupations as compared to higher-paid ones resulted in relatively strong average wage growth. A partial reversal of this trend since then accounts for some of the sluggishness in wages in the recent expansion.
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